In low tones the controller said: "I wish it hadn't happened. He was a
nice-looking youngster, that Wilder--promising."
I said: "In the name of heaven, sir, it's not going to happen if we
pull ourselves together. If we can locate the very beginning and change
it, he'll probably marry the girl and live happily ever after."
"Of course--" The controller was confused. "I hadn't realized."
I said: "We've got to hunt back a lot more and locate this FitzJohn. He
seems to be the key man in this puzzle."
* * * * *
And how we searched. Boys, it was like working a four-dimensional
jig saw, the fourth dimension in this case being time. We located a
hundred universities that maintained chairs and departments exclusively
devoted to FitzJohn's mathematics and theories. We slipped back a
hundred years toward the present and found only fifty and in those
fifty were studying the men whose pupils were to fill the chairs a
century later.
Another century back and there were only a dozen universities that
followed the FitzJohn theories. They filled the scientific literature
with trenchant, belligerent articles on FitzJohn, and fought gory
battles with his opponents. How we went through the libraries.
How many shoulders we looked over. How many pages of equations we
snap-photographed from the whirling octahedron for future reference.
And finally we worked our way back to Bowdoin College, where FitzJohn
himself had taught, where he worked out his revolutionary theories and
where he made his first converts. We were on the home stretch.
FitzJohn was a fascinating man. Medium height, medium color, medium
build--his body had the rare trick of perfect balance. No matter what
he was doing, standing, sitting, walking, he was always exquisitely
poised. He was like the sculptor's idealization of the perfect man.
FitzJohn never smiled. His face was cut and chiseled, as though from a
roughish sandstone; it had the noble dignity of an Egyptian carving.
His voice was deep, unimpressive in quality, yet unforgettable for the
queer, intense stresses it laid on his words. Altogether he was an
enigmatic creature.
He was enigmatic for another reason, too, for although we traced
his career at Bowdoin backward and forward for all its forty years,
although we watched him teach the scores and scores of disciples who
afterward went out into the scholastic world to take up the fight
for him--we could never trace FitzJohn back into his youth. It
was impossible to pick him up at any point earlier than his first
appearance on the physics staff of the college. It seemed as though he
were deliberately concealing his identity.
Yarr raged with impotent fury. He said: "It's absolutely aggravating.
Here we follow the chain back to less than a half century from today
and we're blocked--" He picked up a small desk phone and called
upstairs to the data floors. "Hullo, Cullen? Get me all available data
on the name FitzJohn. FitzJOHN. What's the matter, you deaf?
F-I-T-Z ... That's right. Be quick about it."
I said: "Seems as if FitzJohn didn't want people to know where he came
from."
"Well," Yarr said pettishly, "that's impossible. I'll trace him
backward second by second, if I have to!"